Democratic
US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton meets with civil-rights
leaders at the National Urban League in the Manhattan borough of
New York City, February 16, 2016.REUTERS/Mike Segar

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that State Department officials
should be questioned about whether Hillary Clinton's use of a
private email server while she served as secretary of state
undermined public access to official government
records, as required under the Freedom of Information Act.

"There has been a constant drip, drip, drip of
declarations. When does it stop?" US District Judge Emmet
G. Sullivan said in a Tuesday decision,
according to The Washington Post.

He added: "This case is about the public’s right to
know."

The decision, which stemmed from a lawsuit brought by the
conservative legal group Judicial Watch, brings forth the
possibility that the group could "question top aides to
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about whether she
deliberately sought to thwart open records laws by using a
private email server," according to The Associated
Press.

Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state has
hung over her bid for the presidency for nearly a year.
The FBI has been looking into whether any
classified material was mishandled during Clinton's tenure at the
State Department from 2009 to 2013. The agency has said, however,
that she is not a target in the investigation.

Since Clinton handed her server over to the FBI
in August last year, slow "drips" of information as to what those
emails contained have been uncovered — from the court-ordered
State Department release of the emails, but also often by unnamed
intelligence officials speaking to media outlets.

Hillary
Clinton testifying before the House Select Committee on
Benghazi.AP

The releases and the reports have cast a shadow
on Clinton'srepeated claims that she
never sent nor received information marked classified —
especially since more than 1,300 emails on her server have
been retroactively marked "classified" in the State Department's
releases, according to The Hill.

At a Tuesday CNN town-hall event in Columbia,
South Carolina, Clinton said the controversy surrounding her
emails would not "have any lasting
effect."

"Look, I'm well aware of the drip, drip, drip,"
she told CNN's Chris Cuomo, who moderated the event. "I've been
in the public arena for 25 years, and have been the subject of a
lot of ongoing attacks, and misinformation and all the rest of
it. ... Thefacts are that every single
time somebody has hurled these charges against me, which they
have done, it's proved to be nothing. And this is no different
than that."

Clinton, who handed over about 55,000 pages of
work-related emails for the State Department to make public last
March, added that "nobody in any cabinet position has ever been as transparent
or open" as she has been with her emails.

That someof the information in the emails she
handed over was redacted before it was released, however,has ledsome to speculate that sensitive
national-security information passed through her server.

Further complicating Clinton's argument that she
has been completely transparent is the fact that she deleted
about 31,000 emails she says were "personal" in nature before
handing her inbox over to the State Department.

"What emails ... were deleted ... who decided to
delete them, and when?" Judicial Watch wrote in its
filing.

US
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a
campaign rally at the Laborers International Union hall in Las
Vegas.Thomson
Reuters

Those deleted emails would have been captured by a government
server and preserved as federal records had Clinton used a
state.gov email address.

All of this gives weight to the argument in
Sullivan's decision on Tuesday. He wrote that there is"at least a 'reasonable suspicion'" that
Clinton's private setup undermined the public's right to access
official government records.

After months of negative headlines that battered her campaign,
the Democratic presidential frontrunner
apologized in September for her email arrangement. But she
has insisted that she didn't violate protocol — noting that she
used communication practices that were widespread across the
federal government — or pass along material marked classified.

Even so, Sullivan's ruling is a sign that her email woes are
unlikely to go away anytime soon.

Hillary Clinton’s emails could now "take on a life of their
own," Anne L. Weismann,executive director of
the Campaign for Accountability, told The Washington Post. And
the troubles might not end, she added,"until
there are endless depositions of top [agency] aides and
officials, and just a parade of horribles."